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What You Need To Know About The Vertical Video Trend

August 10, 2017

Digital advertisers are fiercely conscious of the impact of various advertising formats on their advertising initiatives. On their minds are questions like, which are going to be the most impactful, for which initiatives, etcetera. The reason is, the ad format that you choose for your campaign can play a huge role in engagement and attention with your online ads. When speaking of advertising formats we mean: display, mobile, video and native to name a few. Each format has a number of variations that indicate the size, positioning and interaction possible with the ad. To get an idea of the various ad formats available to advertisers, take a look at this gallery.

One format that has gone viral this year is vertical video. While this only represents a small portion of video inventory sold today, there are reasons to believe that it will become more popular among advertisers in the near future.

Another amazing finding from this study is that, it is estimated the number of digital video viewers will climb by over 100 million each year through 2020, when it will surpass 2.50 billion. During that time, more than six out of 10 internet users globally will watch at least one digital video per month. And penetration is highest in North America, where more than two-thirds of the population will watch digital video 2017.

How Does Mobile Play a Role?

It goes without saying that the global market has also experienced an explosion of mobile phone usage in the past decade since the first iPhone was released. Another eMarketer report revealed that by the end of 2017, 36.9% of the world’s population will use a mobile phone to go online at least once a month. With such a massive percentage of the population accessing the internet via a mobile device, it is critical to always consider that your audience will be consuming your advertisements via a mobile device.

There’s A New Kid On The Block: Vertical Video

The terminology “vertical video” references any video that is played and formatted for the portrait layout vs. landscape (horizontal). Snapchat was a pioneer in the vertical video initiative, followed by Facebook, and when a number of statistics were released proving the increased engagement seen using this format, other publishers followed suit such as Mashable, Hearst, Buzzfeed, Washington Post and YouTube.

More data coming from MOVR’s Mobile Overview Report states that smartphone users hold their phones vertically 94% of the time, and Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends reported that vertical viewing accounted for 29% of view time in 2015, compared with 5% five years ago. These stats help us to understand why more and more publishers seem to be jumping onboard the vertical format.

Vertical Video Performance In The Numbers

Digiday reported that the average vertical mobile user watched over half of the 15-second video campaigns posted on the Washington Post. Flipboard also had success with their vertical video campaign with conversions being 20% higher with vertical viewers. Similarly, Snapchat have claimed that their vertical video ads have 9 times the completion rate of horizontal video. With these impressive numbers, marketers’ interest in the format is being peaked.

The Jury Is Still Out

The jury is still out on the topic of vertical video. The reason is, while there is a significant amount of supporting data to the increased performance attainable via vertical video ad units compared to horizontal, there are a number of challenges associated with the adoption of the format. Access to inventory, availability of the format across internet properties, costs to production of vertical specific video content, integration of the new format for programmatic usage, regulations and standards set out by governing bodies such as the IAB and MMA, among others all still need to be overcome.

While vertical video viewing will definitely not replace horizontal viewing, particularly for applications like high quality music videos or movie streaming, an exploration of the potential of vertical videos will help content producers be prepared for the future of this high impact format and enable them to be first movers in reaching a wider, and most importantly, a higher-converting audience for generating leads and spreading market awareness about your brand.